Waiting for Cranes

by Sybille Haeussler

Early April is time for frost heaves and gusts of grey wind - winter’s final taunt. I am badly afflicted by spring fever. Each year this fever comes earlier and burns more intensely. Blame it on global warming; by April the longing is unbearable.

My friends fly to Hawaii now while tickets are cheap. The pastel colours and semi-naked bodies on the beach must cool them down. Drew and I, we’re much too tough for that. As Drew says, "why miss all the best spring skiing, especially when the season-pass isn’t nearly paid off?"

From where I’m sitting at the kitchen table I can just see Drew outside. He’s spent the morning building cross-drains on the driveway, channelling run-off into the ditch. They’re miniature versions of the water bars they put on all the logging roads these days, to keep us out. Now he heads across the snowpack to inspect the burn pile. Every three steps he breaks through the crust, clumps of snow falling into his open feltpacks. Serves him right.

Digging ditches must have warmed Drew up because he’s now stripped down to his T-shirt, exposing the fine, firm swell of his biceps just below the sleeve. Then the morning sun becomes blocked by transient clouds, and a chill wind swirls devils of dust and loose hail around him. He comes inside, swearing. I’m imagining what we might do together, but by the time I rouse myself to put on a CD, he’s already poured his cup of coffee and settled in with the Saturday paper.

A week later, we’re piling green willow boughs on our bonfire when I hear them. It’s an unmistakable shrill gargle that sends blood surging to my fingertips and toes. I grab Drew by the arm and we rush to a clearing in the yard to watch. We always hear them long before we see them. They arrive in loose, disorderly bundles, groups of 50 to 300, never forming tidy V’s like Canada geese. When they reach our ridge, the shrilling intensifies and they turn, reeling in circles, catching thermals, rising higher and higher until, gaining the altitude they need, they can continue on their way.

Sandhill cranes, 25,000 in all, flying north to breeding grounds in Alaska. Each bird lives 20 to 30 years, passing over the same ground spring and fall, noting the changes, as cities stretch out over farmland and cutblocks proliferate across the Interior Plateau.

They say cranes mate for life. At rest stops on their long migration route, the pair will dance for each other in one of Nature’s most sublime shows. It’s an amazing display of ritual excitement, flutters, and leaps that synchronize breeding cycles and renew the spousal bond. I have read, though, that out on the arctic tundra the female bird actually copulates with several different males, leaving her mate to incubate the young. I think that’s called a cuckold, but what would I know?

After the first wave of cranes passes overhead and we can no longer hear them, I feel just like a kid after a parade. “Let’s follow them north!” I shout to Drew, who’s walking back to poke the fire. “I’ll grab some lunch. I know exactly where to go.”

By the time we’ve loaded a few things into the truck and filled the tank with gas, not even the stragglers are in sight. But we drive north on the highway, hoping to overtake them. They must be flying very high, or awfully fast, because we don’t see a single bird all the way to Hazelton. Drew thinks of turning back. But it’s a beautiful day and he loves driving gravel roads, so we carry on towards the Kispiox Valley.

We find an empty, half-flooded field of stubble and mud, and sit for a while in the cab, eating sandwiches, till Drew says, starting the ignition “Let’s drop in on Barb and Ernie on the backroad.”

Several beers and a good steak dinner later, Drew is feeling sleepy and asks me to drive us home. He wakes up startled as I park the truck under a clump of naked cottonwood trees.

“What the hell are we doing here again?”

“I think we should camp out. Might be fun,” I say.

“It’s bloody cold this time of year.”

“You could keep me warm.”

I dig out cookies and we munch them as we walk the fence line bordering the field, holding hands. There still aren't any cranes and the sky is getting dark. We clear off the mattress lining the plywood bunk in the pickup canopy and unroll the sleeping bags kept there for emergencies. I make pillows from our coats.

I wake from a nightmare that a jet plane is crushing my body. An enormous rushing noise pins me to the runway, vibrations on all sides. Sitting up, I bump my head on the canopy roof. I try to look out the canopy window but it’s dark. I am paralysed by fear and wonder. The cranes have arrived.

      At dawn, Drew wakes me up and we manoeuvre stiffly out the tailgate window. The muddy road is hard with frost. There is a cooing sound, like throaty doves, coming from where the cranes stand ankle-deep in icy water. Drew takes me by the hand and leads me, running, across the hoar-tipped, wet meadow. Then, with the massive wings of a thousand sandhill cranes unfurling all around us, Drew performs their famous courtship dance.

Trumpets in the Orchestra of Evolution

  • Cranes are ancient birds dating back 60 million years to the Palaeocene Epoch, and sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis) are the oldest known bird species still in existence, based on fossils more than 14 million years old. The conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote that when we hear their call, “we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution . . .the symbol of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men. . . Their annual return is the ticking of the geological clock.”
  • With a total population numbering 500,000 to 700,000, the sandhill crane is the most abundant of the world’s 15 species of cranes. Its range extends across North America and into eastern Siberia.
  • Up to 25,000 cranes migrate though central British Columbia in April, flying south again in September and October. Their route takes them though the Okanagan Valley, over Kamloops, Williams Lake and the Chilcotin Plateau, then up the Bulkley and Kispiox valleys to southeastern Alaska. Most of these birds winter in agricultural fields of the Central Valley, California and nest in Bristol Bay, Alaska.
  • These migratory birds are Lesser Sandhill Cranes (Grus canadensis canadensis), the smallest and most numerous of the five races of sandhill crane. They stand almost 4 feet (1.2 m) tall and have a wingspan of 6 feet (1.8 m) but weigh less than 8 lbs (3.2 kg). Greater and Canadian sandhill cranes nest in coastal and south-central B.C. These two races are less abundant and are officially blue-listed (considered Vulnerable) in B.C. because their nesting habitat is threatened by development.
  • Crane music is thrilling. The vocalisations, which range from a rumbling purr to a loud rattle to an ear-piercing shriek, are produced in an unusually large trachea that coils downwards then flares out onto the breastbone or sternum like some kind of primordial bugle.
  • Around the world wherever cranes congregate - in China, Australia, the Mediterranean, or the Kispiox Valley - their ballet-like movements have inspired human dance. And recently, the grace and beauty of these birds and their vulnerability to habitat destruction, have made them a powerful icon of conservation.

    • Resources:

    Aldo Leopold. 1966. A Sand County Almanac with other essays on conservation from Round River. Oxford University Press.

    Paul A. Johnsgard. 1991. Crane Music. Smithsonian Institute Press. Wash. & London.

    R. Wayne Campbell and others. 1997. The Birds of British Columbia Vol. 2. University of Washington Press.

    www.ngpc.state.ne.us/wildlife/cranes.html Sandhill Cranes. Wings over the Platte.

    (Sybille Haeussler is a lifelong resident of northwestern BC. She is currently studying forestry at the University of Quebec in Montreal.)
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